Publishing the Public Word: Poetry, Networked Tribes, and Resilient Communities

I'll be teaching a 4-day workshop at Naropa next month and thought I'd share my in-progress syllabus here. Responses are welcome. I designed this course around the Slow Poetry discussion that began last summer. I've focused the class on the rhetorical aspect of poetry and its possible contribution to community formation and public engagement.

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Goals. One basic premise informs this class: globalization has hit a wall. With this in mind, I'd like to talk with students about how poetry is produced and publicized. We will discuss ways to create community and art in a world facing resource contraction—and the social consequences this will have. Students will contribute to a blog that documents our conversation, and produce a small body of work that addresses some of the issues we discuss.

Since the focus of the class will be on how poetry and communities interact, we’ll discuss strategies for using poetry to generate conversations about how we live in the world. We’ll talk about publication strategies, editorial goals, production methods, and other practical tools for bringing poetry into particular communities. Since the goal of the course is focused on process rather than on final products, we will discuss communication strategies that help facilitate methods for communal and public engagements.

Some other things to think about this week include the intersection of private and public realms; performances of gender and sexuality; community formations; print and digital mediation methods. To this end we can talk about definitions of poetry, rhetoric, communication, and public spheres. I also want to think about these issues in an economic era of resource contraction, tracing a key question throughout the week: what can poetry do to create and extend community, and how are we to define and nurture such creative spaces?

Texts. I tried to limit the reading this week but assume students will be familiar with a few key texts each day. In addition to the class reader, familiarize yourself with these blogs:

Economy, politics, resources, communication: http://www.bloomberg.com/; http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com; http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com; http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net; http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/; http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/; http://www.joshiejuice.com/blog/

Poetry and poetics: http://web.ncf.ca/ek867/wood_s_lot.html; http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet; http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com; http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com; http://possumego.blogspot.com; http://poetsagainstthewar.org/; http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/

Workshop. This week is dedicated to thinking about the contexts in which poetry is produced and read. To that end, I would like for students to continue working on projects begun in previous weeks, but I’d like you to consider your work in relation to others, asking these key questions: Who am I writing for? What do I want from a reader? What do I want my work to accomplish? Where and how will I publish it?

Each class will open with general remarks on a topic and is open for discussion. We’ll look at some key texts and problems in order to develop strategies for approaching our own work. The second portion of each class will be dedicated to discussion of individual poems and projects provided by students in the class. We may also look at examples of poems and performances by other writers. Feel free to ask me questions and put me to work based on your needs. A lot of how the workshop develops will depend on the class’s individual requirements. My main goal is to open up discussion for the rhetorical aspect of poetry, and hopefully to complicate and challenge received notions of rhetoric, aesthetics, communication, and communities.

Workshop class 1 (July 6).
Introduction: The Levertov-Duncan Conflict
Duncan, Levertov letters and poems

Workshop class 2 (July 7).
“Poetry as a Field of Action”: Modernist Rhetoric and Poetics
Williams and Burke essays; Nguyen, Kyger poems

Workshop class 3 (July 9).
Tribes and Publics:
Borkoff / Sand, Bey essays: Toscano, Dorn poems

Workshop class 4 (July 10).
Poets Against War
Poets Against War and Kent Johnson’s “Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, or: ‘Get the Hood Back On’”

Blog. Blogs can provide important forums for poetry communities who wish to further discussions of poetry from diverse geographical locations. Blogs are flexible and easily adaptable to our needs. Some bloggers provide critical commentary while other prefer more non-discursive formats. Some bloggers provide news and updates about the larger poetry communities that intersect across the nation and globe. Others post on events, readings, social issues, writing strategies, and other related phenomena. In short: a blog can be about anything and presented in just about any format. But a successful blog provides a certain standard of consistency, relevance to a particular audience, and presence of mind. It’s my hope during our week together that we might create a “disposable” blog, one that may or may not continue beyond our week together. I’d like for students to design and implement it based on their interests. As a group blog, we’ll all be free to contribute to this public forum in ways that we determine. Since our week together is dedicated to better understanding community, a public forum that shares our discussions with others will hopefully further our conversation by brining it to a limited public readership. We’ll discuss the specifics during the first class, but ideally we’ll use our blog to share notes, present useful commentary, and offer brief poems and images that document our week together.

Course Reader Contents

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space, (Long Beach: Palm Press, 2008).

Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

Kenneth Burke, “Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy,” Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Literature: An Exploration ed. Don M. Burks (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1978).

Hakim Bey, T. A. Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1985).

Edward Dorn, "Tribe," Way More West (New York: Penguin, 2007).

Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi, eds., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

Kent Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008).

Joanne Kyger, selections from About Now: Collected Poems (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 2007).

Hoa Nguyen, selections from Hecate Lochia (Prague: Hot Whiskey, 2009).

Rodrigo Toscano, "Pig Angels of the Americlypse," Collapsible Poetics Theater (Albany: Fence Books, 2008).

Williams Carlos Williams, “The Poem as a Field of Action,” Selected Essays(New York: New Directions, 1969).